Despite the fact that the average cost of a data breach has skyrocketed to $3.62 million, and 60% of small businesses go out of business within six months of getting hacked, an alarming 54% of organizations still use spreadsheets and paperto handle privileged credentials. Understandably, the only people who are happy about this are cyber criminals, who rely on old tactics — such as using compromised Windows administrator and Unix root credentials — to steal data, commit identity theft, and wreck corporate reputations.

The best — and frankly, the only — solution to this growing threat is for organizations to switch from a reactive posture to a proactive one, in which they no longer ask: “What should we do when we get hacked?”, but instead ask: “Since someone is almost certainly going to try and hack us sooner or later, how do we fortify our defenses and stay a step ahead of the bad guys?”.

The answer to this vital question is for organizations to deploy a comprehensive next-generation Privileged Access Management (PAM) strategy.